Posts Tagged ‘gardens’

I just received this message from WordPress a few minutes ago with this logo:

“Congratulations on writing 100 posts on Gardens and Empty Spaces!”

Haha, it’s my 100th blog post on my other blog Gardens and Empty Spaces. I have long neglected this blog because for the last six months I haven’t taken pictures of my garden until today. I have to use my tab to take photos. I am glad that for every milestone in blogging, WordPress has always a reminder so we won’t forget.

Come visit me there if you have time. Would love to update it at least once a month.

I am getting frustrated. Maybe this is the wrong time to upload pictures because our internet provider is so slow. I wonder why. This morning I made a backup of all the shots I took since January. I copied them to my hard drive including the pictures of Nate that Nissa forwarded to me. Better be sure than sorry.

Since I posted the pictures I took of my garden blooms earlier in another blog, I am sharing them with you. They are in high-resolution format. Again, my problem here is lack of free space for uploading. At least at Gardens and Empty Spaces, it’s just my 86th post. Come visit my other blog if you are not yet subscribed to it.

Do you know that I also collect key chains as a hobby? It started with just one gold-plated gift from a former boss one Christmas season thirty years ago. I have more than two hundred pieces from different countries mostly in Asia. All of them are gifts from family and friends. Those who know my penchant for collecting don’t find it hard to give me gifts. Yes, key chains are enough. I recently received two from Nissa, one is from Singapore and the other one is from Brazil (Football Connect). Last Saturday, Reymon, one of my friends who came over for our small party gave me two more. He visited Malaysia and Hongkong late last year and bought some lovely key chains. After all these years, they haven’t tarnished. I wish I could find some from Europe like Spain or France or Netherlands or UK, I don’t have those yet. I have a Bible key chain too, the only one I bought years ago but I could not read the words since they are too small. The wonderful world of collecting.

A friend recently signed me in to another book group, this time at Facebook. I’ve missed attending their monthly meetings since I could not keep up with their discussions. Every month, they hold it in different places with assigned moderators. Two questions that elicited so many comments were these: 1) What are your three favorite books of all time? 2) What are you reading right now? I love reading their comments and what books really influenced them or inspired them that these are their favorites. Number one on my list is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I reread this for the third time when I found a paperback copy at Booksale a few years ago. It made an impact on me when I read it way back in college. Number two is Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. I can truly relate to this. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery comes close to third of my favorite. I got two more actually, The Road Less Travelledby M.Scott Peck and Man’s Search ForMeaning Victor Frankl. What about you, what are your favorite books? Would really love to hear from you 🙂

With the temperature reaching to as high as 34°C here in Metro Manila, it’s definitely the start of summer days. Surprisingly though, it’s still a bit cool at night with a light breeze to enjoy the evening. What comes to mind when summer comes are flowers blooming everywhere. Some plants definitely love the sun and it is a joy to always discover something new. Here’s the second set of the pictures I took of my blooming lilies. It’s one of my favorites among the three varieties of lilies I have in my small garden – the white, dainty and sweet-scented Amazon Lily. It has Hosta-like leaves and prefers partial shade. It blooms twice or thrice a year.

I spend part of the morning here watering, digging, weeding or just watching the world go by while having a hot cup of black coffee. And it is a reading nook as well.

And I love those pockets of shadows that say, “welcome the morning with a smile, it’s another great day to garden”.

Even my Ruellia is showing its face everywhere. Ruellias are also called wild petunias. Clustered together, they could be used as ground covers.

PAGASA says summer starts next week. I wonder why it’s been raining the past two days. This morning, it is cloudy. If this is the kind of summer we have, I can only imagine how it is when the actual rainy season sets in. One advantage though is, I don’t have to water the plants except those which are in the shade. It’s actually a perfect opportunity to visit and take a few shots.

And I thought this orange Bougainvillea died on me a few years ago until it showed its face with these lovely blooms. Now I have two colors of Bougainvillea. These two green varieties of prayer plants belong to the arrowroot family. I have three species in my garden, all producing those lovely ornamental leaves.

This is one of my Hoya vines. They are planted in hanging pots with this rounded wire in each basket. I was surprised to find at least six clusters all ready to bloom into lovely pink beautiful flowers. This is how they would look when they are in full bloom and the flowers last for quite a while.

“However many years she lived, Mary always felt that ‘she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow’.” – Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Chipped nails. Dirty hands. Rough palms. They’re just minor disasters compared to the happiness you feel when you are in a garden. I tell you, it won’t be gardening at all if you always use gardening gloves and don’t feel the rich earth in your hands.

It was a busy weekend for me and Josef. He was in-charge of trimming the carabao grass while I re-potted, transferred and planted some bulbs and flowering plants in our small garden. It was a tedious job but all worth it. My Crossandra plants need to be transferred to pots because they are growing everywhere. They produce orange blooms all year round and they are so easy to grow because they are self-propagating.

These are my Rain Lilies newly planted as ground cover, some of them I planted in small pots near the shade. When in bloom, they look like this. Actually, they bloom after the rain, that’s probably where they got their names. This pink one is called Zyphyranthes Rosea. They need full sun though to grow well.

I also transferred my Amazon Lily into four pots. The funny thing is I need to break the original pot in order to re-pot the bulbs since they are closely clustered.

The dark green paddle-shaped leaves of the Amazon Lily are attractive on their own. Time and again, I’ve blogged about its sweet-scented and velvety snow-white blooms. It produces flowers at least three times a year.

And yes, this is another surprise, I saw a pot of my orange lily breaking into a bud and probably in a few days, it would open its arms to the world.

I also planted another bulb plant in two small pots. It’s the red onion variety which is locally planted and sold in our home province in Pangasinan. Locally, we call it lasuna and it is best used in vegetable salads and our famous vegetable recipe called pinakbet.

And the highlight of course is seeing our two jackfruit trees bearing clustered fruits. I am thinking of cooking ginataanglangka in a few days.

My only frustration is, I could not trim our Fukien tea plants in perfect round shapes. I would probably need to hire a professional gardener to do it.

I am really proud of this since it was the first time that my Vanda orchid growing on our avocado tree produced these lovely blooms. What is left of our avocado now are just the trunks holding three Vanda orchids which I bought years ago as saplings. I really don’t use flower booster since they come in expensive packets here. A month ago, I noticed buds just breaking into beautiful red-orange blooms. Maybe it’s time to propagate the stems with protruding roots. And did you know that Vanda is just an Indian word for orchids?

The month of May is always something I do look forward to because I know my lone gardenia shrub would not disappoint. It always gives me that heady and intoxicating scent every time I see a new bloom. Here’s a first for this year and lots more coming because almost every tip has a bud just waiting to unfurl.

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Life starts with a beautiful dream. Life starts in somehow believing that one day you’ll get what you wished and prayed for. Life starts with something you believe you can do and dream about. My entries here are mostly about my journey as a cancer patient, a cancer survivor, a mother, a friend, and about the books I read, places I want to visit and have visited, people I want to meet someday and mostly about the daily grind of simple living. Dreams and Escapes is about having enough faith to go on, the will to live no matter how difficult life may seem sometimes and grateful appreciations of all the things one holds dear. It is about the belief that I could share a little of my journey through writing and writing is an escape for me. When things get a little too hard to bear, I put them into perspective by sharing them here.
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Recent Posts: Dreams Never End

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